Thursday, October 16, 2008

More Random Shots

Perhaps the most newsworthy photographic announcement of the week was the acquisition of the Harry Shunk Archive by the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation. Shunk, who died in 2006 at 81, was known for photographing art by scores of modern and contemporary artists, including Rene Magritte, Yves Klein, Arman, Jean Tinguely, Christo, and Lichtenstein himself. But his most famous image, the photomontage "Le Saut Dans La Vide", a composite recreation of a purported event by Yves Klein, still stands as the defining moment of performance art. The archive, comprising thousands of prints and negatives, was purchased at a public estate auction conducted by the public administrator of New York. I believe this means it was picked up for a song.

I've always been a big fan as well as a student of NASA pictures, but I just happened to stumble across the above which I'd never seen before. Left on the moon by Charlie Duke of Apollo 16, according to NASA the picture was taken by Loudy Benjamin and contains a message on the back which reads "This is the family of Astronaut Duke from Planet Earth. Landed on the Moon, April 1972." Underneath the message are the signatures of his wife and kids. I believe history will record this as the first lunar print giveaway, the intended recipient being one photo loving extra-terrestrial!

From the site Ffffound, a poolside photograph which looks strangely like a photorealist painting.

This year's Nobel Prize in chemistry went to Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, and Roger Tsien for discovering and developing green fluorescent protein, or GFP, that has helped researchers watch the tiniest details of life within cells and living creatures. This image of fluoresced mouse brain cells illustrates their research but seems as much art as science.

And finally, for all those with cool camera envy, Olympus have just unveiled their forthcoming Micro Four Thirds concept camera. Little technical information is available as of now, but with its retro styling and small size the camera was the hit of last month's Photokina.

11 comments:

Love your recent Random Photos. Hope you make it a regular feature. They surface as found objects from cyberspace that surprise and delight. The poolside entry in this series is Ghirri-esque, and works well with the title "It's beautiful here, isn't it..."

Bob Mann had a show of 16x16" NASA dye transfer prints about 20 years ago that included the Charlie Duke family portrait image. I haven't been into space pictures since I was about 10, but I bought this one print. It documents an extraordinary act of performance art, and one that (unlikely most artworks) is unlikely ever to be replicted. He's the astronaut that I'd most like to meet, if only to ask him about this picture.

The prize for GFP is great, it is always nice when the discovery of important tools gets appreciation. The visualisation of biological events is indeed very beautifu. Most published pictures using fluorescent probes have an element of pure aesthetics in addition to their scientific message and this tradition goes back to the early descriptive macroscopic and microscopic anatomists. From the very early Andreas Versalius to the later histological drawings of Gustav Retzius they all added an element of artistic interpretation of the body and this art is still thriving in the scientific community of today, using cameras and laser microscopes instead of pen and paper./liv eidsmo

"If only all blogs were as life-affirming and tender-hearted as that of gallerist James Danziger. Whether his focus falls on the work of an individual artist or a particular theme, The Year in Pictures is compulsive reading."